Is China a collectivist society or an atomized one?
As I was reading through various academic papers, I noticed some scholars still describe China as a collectivist society, while others have already picked up on its growing atomization. On online forums and insightful blogs, it’s rare to find anyone still clinging to the label of “collectivist society”—most now describe China as deeply atomized.
So, which diagnosis holds up better?
Frankly, whether from the perspective of Hegelian philosophy or everyday psychological experience, contemporary China is almost certainly a highly atomized society. And its degree of atomization may well be unmatched by any other country in the world today.
Anyone familiar with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right will immediately recognize the problem when looking at modern China: there is a lack of mediating institutions between the state and the family. This leads to what Hegel calls “abstract universality.” In other words, universals—such as civic ideals or social norms—do not concretely manifest in people’s daily lives. Without “concrete universality,” there is no meaningful mediation between the individual and the state—nor between individual and individual.
When we zoom in on daily life, the picture becomes even clearer. The traditional rural society has withered away, and from small towns to major cities, interpersonal relationships are increasingly characterized by coldness and distrust. Social skills are widely lacking. Many people don’t know basic social etiquette. Loneliness is pervasive—not just psychological, but existential. Many are glued to their phones for hours on end. Few are willing—or even know how—to actively contribute to their communities unless they stand to gain something or be in charge. Bottom-up organization is virtually nonexistent. Every organization, formal or informal, is top-down.
One of the most disturbing signs of this atomization is the widely circulated surveillance footage on the internet: when a pedestrian collapses on a busy street, or someone is attacked, it often takes several minutes before anyone steps forward to help—or no one does at all. Most people don’t even stop to glance. Some commenters have described these videos as signs of civilizational collapse.
That’s why I completely agree with those insightful observers who diagnose Chinese society as atomized. This diagnosis matches reality. The idea of China as a collectivist society is, at best, an outdated myth. At least judging from the present, China is not collectivist in any meaningful sense—unless you take political slogans or state media narratives at face value.
It’s true that traditional rural communities were, in limited and local senses, collectivist. But that kind of social fabric has been unraveling for decades. After its disappearance, there’s simply no basis left for a collectivist society. If you don’t even know your neighbor’s name, how can you talk about collectivism?
Anyone still insisting that China is a collectivist society is either:
- disconnected from real life in China,
- parroting old sociological frameworks without thinking,
- or still buying into abstract propaganda.
What’s unfortunate is that even in recent English-language psychology papers comparing China and other regions, the binary of “Chinese collectivism vs. American individualism” still dominates as an explanatory framework. A 2004 cross-cultural study on smiling did begin to challenge this narrative: while the authors tried to use Chinese collectivism to explain certain findings, they also found that American participants showed more collectivist tendencies than the Chinese participants. Sadly, they brushed it off as a sampling issue.
But in the two decades since, Chinese society has become even more atomized. A 2012 study also found that between 1990 and 2007, Chinese people became increasingly individualistic. These findings align with my own lived experience—I also believe Americans are more collectivist than Chinese today.
(This also raises a side question: how come Americans get to have it both ways—a culture of individualism and collectivism? If I get the chance, I’d love to explore that puzzle too.)
Now, to say that China is an atomized society does not mean it is a genuinely individualist society. I distinguish between negative individualism, which characterizes atomization, and positive individualism, which you might associate with the American tradition.
Negative individualism is about isolation, alienation, distrust, indifference, selfishness, and cutthroat “involution-style” competition. It entails a lack of community participation and a breakdown of social organization. Positive individualism, on the other hand, emphasizes personal autonomy, independence, and resistance to external—especially state—intervention in one’s private life.
In contemporary China, what we see is a peculiar mix: on one side, extreme negative individualism; on the other, a widespread lack of personal responsibility, with many still looking to the state to fix their problems at the first sign of trouble.
In short, I urge the stubborn voices in academia who are still propagating the myth of Chinese collectivism to rethink their position. It’s time to stop misleading people.
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